A round of applause for Mike Tomlin and Teryl Austin

The Steelers' staff put together one of the gameplans of the season against the Ravens

There have been some absurdly brilliant gameplans this season. Each week, Ben Johnson is putting on a clinic. Kliff Kingsbury has built some raspers. Defensively, Brian Flores and Vance Joseph have offered one-off gems that have confused and clobbered a succession of the league’s great and good minds. But Mike Tomlin and Teryl Austin deserve a spot on any Gameplan Of The Year (an award that should really exist) ballots for their work against Lamar Jackson and Baltimore’s offense last week.

The Steelers eked out an 18-16 win on Sunday. They earned the turnover look – and blew up a two-point play at the end of the game that could have sent the thing to overtime. But the damage was done well before the final play. 

Pittsburgh’s staff is not the most innovative. They do not run a ton of complex stuff — they have the third-lowest disguise rate in the league this season. They run what they run, relying on a suffocating pass-rush and great players executing like great players to tip the scales in their favor.

And what a group! Up and down the Steelers line it’s a Who’s Who of studs. By some distance, Pittsburgh sports the best — and deepest — defensive line rotation in the league. If it’s not TJ Watt blasting folks off the edge, it’s Cam Heyward (the best defensive player in football this season, for what it’s worth), breaking down protections inside. If it’s not one of those two, then here comes Larry Ogunjobi efforting his way through the pocket. Opposite Watt, you have Alex Highsmith or Nick Herbig, two dominant edge-rushers in their own right who have to battle it out (or wait for an injury) for reps. For most teams, Herbig would legitimately be their star pass-rusher. In Pittsburgh, he’s a rotational option.

That is, frankly, absurd. This season, the Steelers have three pass-rushers with a pass-rush win rate above 15% – and TJ Watt is not one of them. That’s right: a player who delivers more impactful, game-tilting defensive plays (sacks, forced fumbles, early-down negatives) than any other defensive player in the league is fourth on his own team in pass-rush win rate. He’s also fourth in pressure rate, sitting behind Highsmith (16.0%), Herbig (13.8%) and Heyward (13.4%).

Watt deals with more additional attention than any defender in the league. He is chipped at the highest rate in the league; he is double-teamed at the highest rate in the league. And he warps gameplans more than anyone else, including Myles Garrett, Aidan Hutchinson and Micah Parsons. Beyond being a difference-maker as an edge rusher, Watt also just so happens to be the most destructive run defender in the league. He warps what an offense is doing in all phases, forcing them to make difficult choices: how many extra resources do we allocate? How do we allocate them? In the run game, should we run the ball at him to sap his legs, make him the ‘read’ man to freeze his feet in the option game, or run away from him to try to keep him out of the picture?

What happens when you choose to run away from Watt? Oh darn, there is Cam Hewyard, knifing into the backfield to shut things down on his own – Heyward leads the Steelers this season in run stops (the number of negative run plays forced) with 22, edging out Watt’s 15. 

In the protection world, teams have found creative ways to double Watt. Sometimes, they chip him. Sometimes, they force him to work through the wash, using a kind of ‘moving’ double team, with late help cutting across the formation, whether that’s a tight end (or two), a running back (or two), or both.

In essence, the right tackle (or a tight end) deals with the initial phase of the rush and then someone comes slamming across the formation at a different depth to force Watt to move around that guy, too — whether that’s an extra linemen, a tight end, a fullback, running back or receiver is in the eye of the beholder. Rather than planting a double up on the line — one that Watt might split — it’s about simply adding extra time and beats into his process, beats that allow the quarterback to get rid of the ball before Watt crashes the backfield party.

All of that makes life easier for those around Watt. But make no mistake: Heyward, Highsmith and Herbig are A-plus pass-rushers on their lonesome, torching some of the league’s best off-the-snap and armed with a treasure trove of moves. Taken together, they’re the league’s most potent force. Entering week eleven, the Steelers’ pass rush led the league in quarterback hit rate and ranked in the top-10 in sack rate.

And they did it without the fun and games you see deployed elsewhere. The Steelers do not move Watt around their front; no one moves all that much. There has been a steady uptick in single-mugging fronts this season with the addition of Patrick Queen, giving the Steelers a chance to set the offensive pass protection so they can best attack it, but there has not been a dramatic shift from previous incarnations of Tomlin’s units. They are also not heavily invested in sim pressures, creeper pressures, overloaded fronts or the blitz world, staples of the league’s best groups. When the Steelers have blitzed this year, it’s been from a slim menu. They send heat away from Watt, knowing, in all likelihood, that with the offense allocating resources to slow down their super-duper star there should be holes to attack on the opposite side of the line.

Ever so slowly, the Steelers have become slightly more creative with their zone-pressure packages (attacking with five or six pass rushers while playing zone coverage behind), but nothing that would blow the doors off some of the league’s true zone-pressure wonks. It’s all pretty standard.

And that makes sense. They have freakin’ TJ Watt! They have Cam Heyward! They have Alex Highsmith! They have Nick Herbig! They have Larry Ogunjobi! Preston Smith is on this roster as a rotational edge defender! I mean, Jesus. There are defensive staffs across the league weeping into their pillow that they’re dealing with rotational rusher X while Tomlin and his crew get to pull NICK BLEEPING HERBIG out of the garage whenever they feel like it.

Yet even with that cluster talent of talent and their success, it’s been hard to escape the feeling that Tomlin and Austin could do more with the tools at their disposal if they got a little frisky. What if they had a more expansive pressure package? Could you imagine what Vance Joseph would be able to squeeze out of this group? What about peak Rex Ryan? Would any pass-rushing record be safe? I doubt it. 

But given that Pittsburgh’s four-man group wins so consistently, even in a limited configuration, it makes sense that Austin and Tomlin have bet on winning with a four-down-and-go style, flooding the back end with coverage with the hope of forcing turnovers or tricky throws that toss opposing offenses off schedule. It has (largely) worked.

Well, well, well, who knows what someone poured in Tomlin and Austin’s water last week, but the pair were downright randy against the Ravens.

In a tight game (my word. The hitting, the noise, the vibes. FOOTBALL!), Tomlin and co. turned it into a third-down contest. Facing a front-runner for league MVP and an offense that has shown it can maul anyone when it’s clicking, Tomlin set to work breaking some of Pittsburgh’s traditional habits and throwing Lamar Jackson off-kilter.